Oh all right then.

I said I wasn't going to do this. I came up with several perfectly good reasons why. I already have a journal, a pen-and-paper one, which I use for writing stuff private enough that I don't want even my best friends looking over my shoulder while I write. (If you're reading this, you're probably mentioned in that journal too :-)

And I have reasons for not putting too much personal information about myself in the public arena. I will no doubt rant about those reasons in an upcoming entry.

And I'm not an exhibitionist, by any stretch of the imagination. I like to be noticed by my friends, but I'm quite happy to be invisible to the wider world.

But somehow I ended up doing this anyway. Partly because my PhD project involves sitting in front of a computer for 14 hours a day, and a lot of that time is simply babysitting modelling jobs that take a couple of hours to run - so I need something to do with the time. Partly because my friends are doing this, and I feel like a grouch refusing to do the same. But mostly, I think, because I read their journal entries and somehow it seems fair to be as open to them as they are to me.

Even if I'm leaving out the most important bits.

If you want to know that stuff, you have only to ask. I'll probably even tell you. But you don't get unless you ask.

So here it is.

Incidentally, my friends, I have reversed your colour schemes for my own purposes. This is done purely to annoy you.

Obligatory bored ravings

Another successful modelling run completes (nothing like seeing a two-hour job come to its end, and have your finger literally poised over the 'save' button as the connection dies, eh?). Five minutes of looking at the data, saving the important bits, and setting up the next model. Then back to an hour and a half of babysitting. Not long enough to be worth going back to college, not nearly long enough to get on the train to where I'd like to be, too long to just sit and watch the progress reports. So here I am again.

I love research, really I do. This stuff can be hellishly frustrating at times - when the software licence expires, and I can't do my work. In the last few years NINE MONTHS of my life has been wasted, because someone couldn't do something as simple as renew a licence that lapses once a year . Or when the software is up, but can't solve the model I've given it ("Solution abandoned: failure to converge.") Again, many months down the tube, but at least that time I had something to feel smug about at the end. Because that was a genuine, very serious problem, and I figured out a very sneaky way to get around it. Or when my idiot co-supervisor decides that nothing outside his field of expertise is worth knowing, and that if I'm not going to do the project the way he wants he'll try to destroy it instead...

All those things are intensely aggravating. But I still love research. There's nothing quite like it for mental exercise, and it gives me a buzz I can't begin to describe.

I just wish I could pack those five-minute bursts of activity together into a day or two, and have the rest of the time to myself, instead of having my life cut into pieces that are just too short to do anything worthwhile with. I'd post more on Storyteller and Devilbunnies, but those groups are pretty quiet at the moment. I'd get on with any of several stories that I'm partway through writing for those same groups, but those involve participation from other people who are too busy to play right now. I work fourteen-hour days, and on the weekends I'm tired, so I end up sleeping through too much of them and not doing the housework etc that I ought to.

I love research, but I'll be glad when the workload eases up a bit and I have a social life again. My friends are scattered around the country and around the globe; I see my best friend maybe three or four times a year, if I'm lucky, and I doubt I'll even manage that this year. I'm probably going to Idaho for a conference in September, and somehow I suspect the schedule will leave time for me to meet exactly zero of my friends in the USA.

I'd rant longer, but that's probably not a good idea. This sounds depressed, but I'm not really. Just rather bored, and wishing I could use this time for the things I'd rather be doing.